Leilei Cui is an Assistant Researcher at the School of Life Sciences, Nanchang University.  He received his Ph.D. from Jiangxi Agricultural University (National Key Laboratory for Pig Genetic Improvement and Germplasm Innovation) under the supervision of Academician Prof. Lusheng Huang. He conducted postdoctoral research and participated in a joint Ph.D. training program at University College London (UCL) after Prof. Richard Mott. 

Dr. Cui's research is centred on quantitative genetics and bioinformatics for livestock improvement, particularly in pigs and chickens. He develops GWAS models and computational tools for additive, dominance, overdominance and sex-specific genetic effects, and integrates genomics, transcriptomics and other omics data to investigate heterosis, genetic regulation and mitochondrial variation. His agricultural research addresses economically important traits including growth, carcass composition, meat quality, fatty-acid composition, reproductive traits and genomic selection. Moreover, Dr. Cui is experienced in multi-omics data analysis (genomics, transcriptomics, full-length transcriptomics, microbiome) and skilled in the full spectrum of complex trait genetic analysis: variant detection, phenotype-genotype association analysis, QTL fine-mapping, causal variant filtering and verification, and molecular mechanism exploration. 

1. ADDO non-additive GWAS toolkit: Developed the R package ADDO, which jointly models additive and dominance genetic covariance in a mixed-model framework and supports the detection, classification and visualisation of additive, partially dominant, completely dominant and overdominant QTL for complex-trait and heterosis research.

2. Cross-species dominance architecture: Led analyses of 574 complex traits and multi-tissue gene-expression data in pig, rat and mouse resource populations, revealing associations between dominance effects, trans-acting gene regulation and alternative splicing, with direct relevance to livestock heterosis and breeding.

3. Sex-specific genetic architecture of pig: Applied sex-stratified GWAS and locus-effect difference tests to identify sex-dependent loci for complex traits in a large pig F2 population.

4. Genetic basis of pig mitochondrial DNA copy number: Integrated population genomics, transcriptomics and functional experiments to identify nuclear loci regulating skeletal-muscle mitochondrial DNA copy number in pigs.

5. Farm-animal regulatory genomics: Contributed to PigGTEx and FarmGTEx resources that map genetic regulatory effects across pig and other farm-animal tissues, supporting functional interpretation of livestock complex-trait loci and genomic selection.

Besides, Dr. Cui has more than five years of overseas research experience across the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands, including joint doctoral training and postdoctoral research at University College London, a visiting scholarship at Aarhus University's Center for Quantitative Genetics and Genomics, and an academic visit to Wageningen University. These appointments established sustained international collaborations in livestock genetics, statistical genomics and agricultural animal breeding. Moreover, he has authored or co-authored 20+ peer-reviewed journal articles which were published in journals including Nature Genetics, Genome Biology, Bioinformatics and Genetics Selection Evolution.

Dr. Cui is a member of the Chinese-American Association of Geneticists and the International Consortium of Seed Scientists. He serves as a reviewer for several international journals, including Ageing Cell, Bioinformatics, Advanced Biology, Scientific Reports, Bioinformatics Advances, BMC Genomics, and BioData Mining. To date, he has published 20+ research articles in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Genetics, Genome Biology, Science China-Life Sciences, Bioinformatics, and Genetics Selection Evolution.